I’ve seen many
articles wailing about the uselessness of college degrees, but there’s
a bigger scam going on in college than useless degrees…a much, much, bigger
scam that’s so far been kept secret from even the most diligent opponents
of higher education. Let’s expose that secret today.

A great scam
needs suckers, and the more suckers, the better. It didn’t take long before
administrators realized that the big, big money was in broadening the
market, and through their efforts student enrollment has more than doubled
since the 80s.

In today’s
college environment, most anyone can get accepted into an institution
of higher learning. Student loans are not strictly acquired by people
who “want to learn,” even if they don’t know all that much to begin with.
Instead, student loans are granted to anyone who can “check a box saying
you are a degree seeking student.”

The easily
acquired and plentiful student loan scheme means anyone can go to college,
but what if the student has little in the way of academic skill or interest?
A popular TV commercial hawking college education has the would-be student
sing about not doing great in high school—enough to keep a student out
of college, years ago, and evidence the old myth is still alive.

It’s
not just late night TV commercials that target these potential students
for enrollment, although there has always been some option for remedial
classes at college or university. Only a few such classes were offered,
since “in the good old days,” it was rare for students lacking in basic
skills to nonetheless gain admittance to an institution. A student without
basic reading, writing, or arithmetic skills could get in, but thirty
years ago, if he didn’t catch up quickly, the university would prevent
him from destroying his finances and life. Nowadays there are many sections
of remedial courses taught each semester, often more than sections for
“college” courses. These courses generally move slower than normal courses,
since administration thinks when a student is behind, he’ll catch up by
slowing down. These poor souls spend years wandering from one remedial
course to another, only to get destroyed by the pace of real college courses
when they finally make it of remedial programs.

Administrations
at many institutions have become very successful at talking people into
checking that box, and remedial--administration likes to use the word
“developmental”, but I’ll stick with the correct word, “remedial”—students
have come to dominate “higher education” now. Around half of incoming
students require remediation. It would be a clear majority, but college
material has been defined down quite a bit (the first year courses I took
in the 80s are now second or third year courses, and even some graduate
courses are little different than what used to be first year courses).

College student
population has more than doubled…but most students are remedial. It follows
then that the growth of the student base in higher education has been
due to the elimination of standards.

Having a great number of students going into remedial courses
looks bad for institutions of higher education, but administration tirelessly
works to fix this problem, but not in a way that a person of integrity
might think:

“We’re
going to reduce the score necessary on the placement test to get into
College Algebra so that even the weakest students will be told they can
skip developmental courses if they want to. They’ll still be competitive.”

--Administrator,
explaining a clever plan to reduce the number of students taking remedial
courses. Until I heard this, I had no idea that getting an education was
a competition. This change in policy led to several disastrous years in
the entry level mathematics courses.

So what is
a remedial student? When a student enrolls, often he’ll take some sort
of placement test to see where he fits as far as reading, writing, and
mathematical skills. There are many sorts of tests, each with their own
special scoring system, ultimately translated into either “good enough
for a college level course” or “should take a remedial course.” Most institutions
favor some form of standardized test, paying a dollar or two per student
for the privilege of having an independent company quickly grade and administer
the test online.

These tests
are far from perfect, but have been around for years, with constant improvement
by many private corporations legitimately interested in providing a better,
more accurate product. They are quick, cheap, and about 95% accurate for
determining which course a student should take. Quick and cheap are important
factors—the days of real “entrance examinations” for incoming college
students are long over, students want to be admitted quickly, and administration
complies. The 95% accuracy might sound very good, but it means that in
every classroom of at least 20 students, you’ll expect one student was
misdiagnosed by the test. Not perfect, but good enough, all things considered.

As hinted
in the above quote, administration hates losing control of students to
placement tests, and is always looking into ways to gain more control.
The most likely way in the future will be through PARCC, a placement test
that will allow students to place out of placement tests. It doesn’t take
a calculator to see the amount of money being poured into re-inventing
and centralizing the placement tests is huge. Administration clearly wants
this control, and a reasonable person might wonder how well they could
be trusted with this power.

A student
that does poorly on a placement test, no matter how poorly, is never turned
away. Never. “No problem,” says college admissions, “you’ll just need
to take a developmental course or two and then you’ll be fine!”…as though
a person that’s blown off education for twelve years is really going to
make it all up in a few months.

So higher
education is mostly about remediation and has been for years, but does
it really help these people? One might think that the answer has to do
with those useless degrees people talk about, but only the lucky ones
get a useless degree. The answer comes from the black secret of higher
education:

Fewer than
1 in 10 remedial students will get a 2 year degree within 3 years1.

That’s above
a 90% failure rate, quite possibly after the college soaks up $20,000
or more in loans. All the growth in higher education is in remedial students,
and they’re being horribly abused by the system.

If there
were any integrity to higher education, administrators would look at the
90% victimization rate and say “we need to stop doing this.” Instead,
the bar just gets moved lower and lower and lower…administration responds
to failure by increasing the amount of failure. One might well conclude
they just want the checks and don’t actually care about the students at
all.

Let’s compare
this kind of abuse of the customer to another industry. Depending on various
factors, around 20% of smokers get lung cancer eventually over the course
of a lifetime…this rate is so high that the institutions which promote
smoking, tobacco companies, are considered evil for creating so many victims.

More than
90% of remedial students waste years of their lives and bury themselves
in debt by getting sucked into higher education…what word describes the
institutions that create a much higher rate of victims than tobacco companies?

Here’s
a chart to put things in perspective for a remedial student:

>90% Chance
of a remedial student wasting 3 years of his life with nothing to show
for it

67% Chance
of dying after a stab wound to the heart

52% Chance
of dying after a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis

30% Chance
of dying within 5 years of a heart transplant

20% Chance
of a smoker getting lung cancer

<10% Chance
of dying after being hit by lightning

Now, getting
stabbed in the heart or struck by lightning are activities people should
avoid…and yet remedial students are actually encouraged to go to
college. There are surgeon general’s warnings on packs of cigarettes.
Why aren’t remedial students warned about the disastrous side-effects
of college loans?

40% of students that start in remedial never make
it out of remedial courses. Of course, the college gets the loan money,
while the student gets the debt, so the college has no reason to tell
the student such depressing information…he might change his mind about
going to college, and there goes that sweet check.

Added to
the high failure rate is a massive double-dipping factor. When a community
is being sold on opening up a community college for “higher education,”
or paying for a university to expand its capacity for students, it’s never
mentioned that the majority of the courses will be high school (or lower)
level material—material the community already paid for their children
to learn in high school or earlier. The community’s tax dollars pay for
the institution, which re-teaches (at best) the material that the students
didn’t want to learn when they were children.

The people
building these institutions don’t warn about the double-dipping to the
communities supporting them. Likewise, the remedial students will never
be warned about the grim odds and disaster they face when they check the
box asking for student loans.

Higher education
loan programs were sold to the American public as an opportunity to advance
into a better economic status, but it’s turned into a massive scheme to
take advantage of the most vulnerable members of the public, indebting
them so deeply, so permanently, that they’ll never be anything but broke.
Is this what higher education is supposed to be all about?

Think about
it.

See Remediation:
Higher Education's Bridge to Nowhere, available online; the results
come from looking at data from millions of students. Everyone in education
has known for years that remediation is a disaster, but here’s a study
that shows it unarguably.